Does Bitshares currently have a mission statement? Or some notion of its values and goals. Perhaps a constitution? It might be a really good community building exercise to do given the upcoming release of Bitshares 2. Maybe develop a list of questions and do a survey of the community.
Bitshares is like a business or cooperative. A mission statement should be ratified by the delegates but I would avoid anything too detailed because you don't want to upset potential customers/members with too much rhetoric or ideology. Less is more, like don't be evil.
I think the main issue with Bitshares and Bitshares 2.0 is at least with Bitshares 1.0 the software was very experimental, unstable, and not ready for prime time. Bitshares 2.0 is preparing to be ready for prime time, it can scale, if it is stable, if it has the capabilities being marketed, then the market cap can easily go into the billions of dollars.
Plenty of opportunities for growth in the developing world where they don't have access to anything like Bitshares, or Greece where they don't have a functioning economy and the idea of replacing the Euro with Bitcoin was ridiculous but having Bitshares 2.0 in Greece would make a lot more sense.
I think for marketing the focus could be just on getting Bitshares on ATMs so people can for example buy UIA's from an ATM machine. Once we get to that point then the UIA's can market Bitshares without direct marketing effort. It will be great if I could go to an ATM, buy some Starbucks rewards on, load it into my smart phone, and have it be just like as if I took out cash.
In the developing world, or even in the developed world, the big feature to bring in mass adoption would be UIA's or assets which pay dividends. People do not trust banks even in the developed world, and there aren't a lot of places where people can get 5%-10% on their money year to year, yet with Bitshares anyone in the world should be able to have the opportunity to access that while today you can't even open an account with certain people if you're not already a big player.
So due to inflation, people want to take their cash out of banks. Due to currency manipulation, controls or other reasons, people don't want to store their wealth as cash.